Long, almost one dimensional structures (filaments) are ubiquitous in the universe, consisting of chains of atoms (macromolecules) or regions of concentrated field lines (vortex lines in fluids, magnetic flux tubes in electrically conducting plasmas). Filaments occur at the microscopic scale of proteins and DNA, through the intermediate scales of tornadoes, dust devils and the trails behind planes and boats, up to the huge scales of the star-forming clouds in outer space. When two filaments come close to each other, they can split and recombine, having exchanged strands. Such reconnection events not only change the geometry of the filaments themselves but they also change the underlying topology (the property for which two rings which are linked to each other are different from two rings which are separated). A better understanding of reconnections is therefore crucial to many problems in the natural sciences and in engineering (for example, how the energy of a fluid is spread by reconnections). With reconnections arising across many distinct physical contexts and over many scales, it is natural to ask whether any behaviours are universal, such that a shared framework of understanding can be sought. For example, the loss of energy during a reconnection in a fluid is directly analogous to that which occurs during a reconnection in a plasma despite different physical origins of the loss of energy (viscosity in the fluid and electrical resistivity in the plasma). Other examples debated in the scientific community are whether a measure of the coiling, twisting and linking of the filaments, termed the helicity, is conserved during reconnections, and whether complicated tangled knots of filaments may decay or disentangle in ways which depend on the topology rather than the physical nature of the system. Our understanding of reconnections is still in its infancy and would benefit from detailed quantitative measurements of reconnections, and from comparison of reconnections across different scientific disciplines. In this context, trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) provide an ideal testing ground to study reconnections. BECs are gases of atoms, cooled to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Here the blurry laws of quantum mechanics rule and transform the gas into a quantum fluid. This type of fluid is remarkable in its simplicity: while everyday fluids possess viscosity and can form tornadoes of any size or shape, quantum fluids have no viscosity and their tornadoes have a fixed size and shape. This makes them easier to conceptualise, model and understand. What is more, experimentalists are able to control and manipulate the fluid, and its vortices, to a high level of precision. Our recent preliminary work in collaboration with an experimental group in Trento, Italy, not only demonstrated reconnections in BECs for the first time, but also revealed new and unexpected forms of reconnections. Motivated by this, we will perform detailed computer simulations of vortex reconnections in the ideal context provided by BECs, determining exactly how reconnections occur and what their consequences are. Then, by comparing to the behaviour in different settings (ordinary fluids, plasmas and macromolecules) we will probe whether universal behaviours do exist (for example, if the distance between reconnecting strands scales with time with a universal power law, or if energy losses relate to the amount of knottedness), probing the relation between energy and topology in different systems. To disseminate our results across scientific communities, we will organise an interdisciplinary workshop on reconnections with the top experts from atomic physics, astrophysics, fluid dynamics, knot theory, with a view to building a common picture. Close collaboration with the ongoing experiment at Trento will guide our theoretical studies and provide immediate experimental tests of our findings.

Breast cancer is the commonest cause of death in women between the ages of 35 and 55 in Europe. Worldwide, a woman will die from the disease every 13 minutes. Breast cancer is very much a survivable disease however it is vital that the tumour is caught at an early stage. This requires a national screening programme for all women (in addition to regular self-examination by women of their breasts). Unfortunately the existing screening techniques are not very ideal. X-ray for example, is only suitable for older women and is also quite uncomfortable. Even in these older (post-menopausal) women, it has quite high false-positive rates (resulting in women having unnecessary biopsies) and false-negative rates (in other words, it misses some tumours). There is no suitable routine screening technique available for younger women. The aim of this proposal is to continue research into a new imaging method based on UWB radar. This sends out a short burst of radio-waves into the breast and "listens" for reflections - these radio-waves are completely harmless and the imaging procedure is quick and comfortable. At the moment this new imaging technique is in its infancy and much work remains to be done if we are to reach the ultimate goal of a cheap, quick and comfortable breast imaging method for all women. Because the imaging method is harmless, it could be repeated as often as necessary and because it will be very cheap, it could be based in a GP surgery or even a van, rather than requiring a visit to hospital.

Europe's building stock is increasing in floor area by approximately 1% per annum. This represents an additional operational energy demand of over 4.5 million tonnes of oil equivalent, year on year. Of that energy requirement up to three quarters is related to space heating (or cooling), representing about half of total energy usage in Europe and North America. Ground source heat pumps, which can reduce the net consumption of energy for space heating by approximately 75%, can therefore play a significant and timely role in tackling the energy and carbon emissions challenge. Despite the urgent need to curb the increasing energy requirements of new buildings, the market for ground source heat pump systems faces a number of barriers to expansion. While some of the barriers are related to regulation, investment cost intensity remains an important factor. Consequently, research and development must focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing capital costs. One route to reducing investment capital costs is through the combined use of building foundations for the heat exchanger component of the system, thereby avoiding the need for construction of special purpose heat exchangers such as boreholes. This has the potential to both reduce capital expenditure and deliver increased energy per drilled metre of the heat exchanger. Piles are the most common type of deep foundation. These are typically constructed by augering a hole which is infilled with concrete and steel reinforcement. Energy pile is the term used for a foundation pile which is equipped with heat transfer pipes to act as the heat exchanger part of a ground source heat pump system. Energy piles were first trialled in Austria in 1984, but thermal analysis and design methods have lagged substantially behind the practical application. Recent breakthroughs have shown the importance of the concrete part of the pile in storing thermal energy on a short term basis. This is significant because fluctuating operational energy demand means that a thermal steady state in the piles is rarely achieved. Despite this, most routine design approaches still characterise energy pile in terms of a steady state thermal resistance parameter. This means that any storage of energy in the concrete is neglected and the energy capacity of the system is routinely underestimated. Indeed, the steady state assumption has been shown to underestimate the potential energy saving available from energy piles by around 20%. This proposal outlines planned work which will develop new non-steady models for use with the thermal analysis of energy piles. The work will also include application of these models to in situ thermal response tests which are used to determine the thermal characteristics of the soil surrounding the pile. Hence the new models will contribute to both improved soil parameter selection and less conservative design approaches. This work is novel because there are currently no analytical models that appropriately simulate the transient behaviour of energy piles. By the introduction of appropriate non steady models this work will lead to improved and less conservative assessment of energy available from energy piles and hence increase their uptake in practice. This work is pressing because the alternative of using inappropriate steady state models will result in the under-prediction of ground source heat pump system performance and thereby inhibit uptake of this key renewable heat technology.

The behaviour of people is known to be critical to the security of organizations across all sectors of the economy. As users of IT systems, their action, or inaction, can create cyber security vulnerabilities. For example, users can be tempted to give away their authentication credentials (by phishing), to install malign software (malware), choose weak or inadequate passwords, or they may fail to install security patches, to scan computers for viruses, or to make secure backups of critical data. Organizations design security policies which users are supposed to follow, for example, instructing them not to give away their authentication (login) credentials, or not to open certain kinds of attachments sent in unsolicited emails. However, in practice, managers find it very difficult to encourage users to follow policy. This project will investigate effective ways to improve security communications with users, to enable them to understand security risks, and to persuade them to comply with policy. Our hypothesis is that to be most effective, communications and policy implementations must take into account individual personalities and motivations. Technological support is therefore required to support security communications and security persuasion so that it can scale up to large organizations. We propose to transfer ideas and knowledge from the existing academic field of persuasive technologies and digital behaviour interventions, and apply them to the user security compliance problem. We will build, and trial, real technologies that implement persuasive strategies in real user security scenarios. These scenarios will be selected in partnership with industrial security practitioners. The project takes a broad, interdisciplinary view of the roots of the user compliance challenge, and draws additionally on expert knowledge from the fields of psychology, behavioural decision, security, sentiment analysis and argumentation in search of solutions.

Some of the most fundamental and perhaps bizarre processes expected to occur in the vicinity of black holes are out of observational reach. To address this issue we utilise analogue systems where we study fluctuations on a background flow that in the experiment reproduces an effective black hole. In the literature this line of research is referred to as analogue models for gravity, or simply analogue gravity. Analogue models provide not only a theoretical but also an experimental framework in which to verify predictions of classical and quantum fields exposed to 'extreme' spacetime geometries, such as rapidly rotating black holes. This project brings together two world-wide recognised experts in the field of analogue gravity with the aim of pushing the field in a new direction: we propose ground-breaking studies to mimic some of the bizarre processes occurring in the vicinity of rotating black holes from general relativity and rotating fluids in both water and optical systems. In particular, we will investigate both theoretically and experimentally the interaction between an input wave and a rotating black hole spacetime geometry, here recreated by the rotating fluid. This allows us to mimic a scattering process associated to rotating black hoes called superradiant scattering. From a historical viewpoint this kind of radiation is the precursor to Hawking radiation. More precisely, black hole superradiance is the scattering of waves from a rotating black hole: if the incoming wave also possesses a small amount of angular momentum, it will be reflected with an increased amplitude, i.e. it is amplified at the expense of the black hole that thus loses some of its rotational energy. It has also been pointed out that the same physics may take place in very different systems, for example light incident on a rotating metallic (or absorbing) cylinder may also be amplified upon reflection. Yet, no-one has ever attempted to experimentally investigate the underlying physics that extend beyond general relativity and are relevant to a variety of hydrodynamical and rotating systems. We aim to provide the first ever experimental evidence of this intriguing and fundamental amplification mechanism in two different hydrodynamical systems. The first is a water spout, controlled so that the correct boundary conditions are obtained and optimised for observing BH-SS. The second is a less conventional fluid that is made out of light. Light propagating in a special medium can behave as a fluid or even a superfluid. By building upon highly developed photonic technologies e.g. for the control and measurements of laser beam wavefronts, we will implement very precisely tailored and characterised experiments. One of the unique aspects of this project is the marriage between two very different lab-based systems, one using water the other using light, to tackle an outstanding problem in physics that is of relevance to astrophysics, hydrodynamic and optical systems.